If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

AMD Kaveri: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers

01-19-2014, 06:40 AM

Phoronix: AMD Kaveri: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers

Now having looked at the Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance, carried out an initial GPU comparison, and compared several Intel/AMD processors, our latest performance investigation with AMD's A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU is looking at the Radeon R7 Graphics performance on Ubuntu Linux when using the open-source "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver and then using the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver.

Comment

I wonder how Trinity and Richland fare. Are they in the same boat as Kaveri?

Interesting... the performance looks more like the "before" numbers in Michael's 3.12 vs 3.13 radeonsi article.

Trinity and Richland use r600g instead of radeonsi so there are more performance optimizations in place for those parts. That said, radeonsi was putting out some much improved numbers in yesterday's article as well (albeit on Pitcairn & Tahiti dGPUs with ~3x and ~4x the shader power respectively) so there might be something else going on here.

Based on limited experience with my half-a-Kaveri dev box I was expecting about 2x this performance, ie roughly 1/2 of Catalyst performance rather than 1/4. Anyways, thanks Michael for running the tests.

Comment

Question: What were the clocks and timings of the memory? Memory bandwidth makes a very big difference in the performance of an AMD APU's graphics component, and latency makes a small-but-measurable difference in CPU-bound tests.

Comment

Question: What were the clocks and timings of the memory? Memory bandwidth makes a very big difference in the performance of an AMD APU's graphics component, and latency makes a small-but-measurable difference in CPU-bound tests.

DDR3-2133MHz is what the memory is run at for all Kaveri tests; the timings were whatever the profile was specified at; I don't recall off-hand and sadly not exposed to user-space so not recorded. PTS can only chart the memory frequencies when run as root.